Addendum- The Prince

This mandatory advisement (previous post) is generally met with the reaction that the school has its heart in the right place (if you'll forgive the cliched reification) in attempting to provide better guidance for its students, whether one regards this as a service or disservice, feasible or unfeasible. But a likely "hidden agenda" here is an attempt to address the "retention problem."

Our school has about a 50% retention rate, meaning that about half the entering freshman will graduate. This is fairly typical, give or take, of public colleges, with private schools a little higher. You may well quibble with the figures, as they are almost certainly understated (not accounting for transfers, those that take a while to graduate such as part-timers and other sources of bias) but it is clear that a lot of students who start college don't finish. I imagine there are a lot of reasons why people don't finish, some easily understood, some not. The mandatory advising seems to address one potential reason for dropping out, which is lack of information and the obstacles that creates.

I often think that getting a college degree is more about learning to overcome obstacles than learning what's in textbooks. While learning such skills is important, certainly alleviating student frustration and confusion would help increase student retention as well as good will (leading to increased satisfaction, reputation, enrollments, alumni contributions, etc.).

So the issue is whether the increase in information, satisfaction, retention, etc., are worth the student coercion, some degree of faculty resentment (extra time, additional learning, philosophical differences, etc.), potential problems (system errors, student errors, faculty errors). In other words, do the ends justify the means? They seldom do.